Monkombu S. Swaminathan

Monkombu S. Swaminathan "has been acclaimed by TIME magazine as one of the twenty most influential Asians of the 20th century and one of the only three from India, the other two being Mahatma Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore. He has been described by the United Nations Environment Programme as "the Father of Economic Ecology" and by Javier Perez de Cuellar, Secretary General of the United Nations, as "a living legend who will go into the annals of history as a world scientist of rare distinction." "He has served as President of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources. Prof. Swaminathan is a Fellow of many of the leading scientific academies of India and the world, including the Royal Society of London and the US National Academy of Sciences. He has received 43 honorary doctorate degrees from universities around the world. He currently holds the UNESCO Chair in Ecotechnology at the M S Swaminathan Research Foundation in Chennai (Madras), India."

"He is known as the "Father of the Green Revolution in India" for his leadership and success in introducing and further developing high-yielding varieties of wheat in India.

"He is the founder and Chairman of the MS Swaminathan Research Foundation, and from 2002 to 2005 was Co-Chairman with Dr. Pedro Sanchez of the UN Millenium Taskforce on Hunger. Since 2002, Dr. Swaminathan has been the President of the Nobel Peace-Prize-winning Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs that seek to reduce the danger of armed conflict and find solutions to global security threats."

Biography
Swaminathan was born on August 7, 1925 in the town of Kumbakonam, Tamil Nadu, India, to parents M.K. Sambasivan and Shrimati Thangammal. His father, a medical doctor who had been influential in the town, died when he was 11 years old, leaving him, his mother, and his three siblings alone. "In later years, Swaminathan's work in agricultural research drew upon his early exposure to notions of community development, extending new opportunities to the very poor, and, most important, the idea that self-reliance in food production was essential for Indian national dignity."

Education
Swaminathan earned his baccalaureate degree at Travancore University in 1944 when he was only 19 years old. He went on to study agriculture at Coimbatore Agricultural College in Madras, graduating with a second baccalaureate degree in 1947. That year, he matriculated in the postgraduate program in plant breeding and genetics at the Indian Agricultural Research Institute (IARI) in New Delhi, where he studied under B.P. Pal. He graduated in 1949.

In 1949, Swaminathan won a UNESCO fellowship to study genetics at the Netherlands Agricultural University in Wageningen. He stayed there for one year, and then moved to Cambridge, where he worked on potatoes under H.W. Howard at the Plant Breeding Institute. After achieving his PhD under Howard in 1952, he went on to spend a year doing research at the University of Wisconsin (1952-1953). During this time, his worked on potatoes, focusing on cytogenetics, cytology, and plant breeding.

Career
When he returned to India, Swaminathan first spent a short time at the Central Rice Research Institute, breeding rice. In October 1954, he took a position as an assistant cytogeneticist at IARI in Delhi. When he did so, he switched his focus from potatoes to wheat. As a plant breeder, he was very interested in using radiation to induce genetic mutations in crops. Swaminathan played a key role in bringing Green Revolution wheat varieties to India. (For more information, see the articles on Wheat Breeding in the Green Revolution and The Green Revolution in India.)

In 1972, M.S. Swaminathan replaced B.P. Pal as director general of the Indian Council for Agricultural Research, remaining there until 1979. In 1979, he became secretary of the Ministry of Agriculture and Irrigation (1979-80), and then a member of the Planning Commission (1980-82). After his stint in the Planning Commission, he moved on to become the director general of the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines, working there until his retirement in 1988. Additionally, from 1984 and into his retirement, he served as president of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources.

Role in the Green Revolution
In 1959, Swaminathan learned about the work of Orville Arthur Vogel with semidwarf varieties of wheat that were able to utilize large amounts of commercial fertilizer and produce high yields. He wrote to Vogel, asking for samples of this wheat, and Vogel put him in touch with Norman Borlaug, who had been working on semidwarf varieties that were more suitable for India. Swaminathan arranged to bring Borlaug to India in March 1963. From that point forward, Swaminathan was a key figure in the Green Revolution in India. For more information, see the articles on The Green Revolution in India and Wheat Breeding in the Green Revolution.

Affiliations and Honors

 * Trustee, Rajiv Gandhi Foundation
 * Earthwatch Institute: International Advisory Council
 * Campaign Committee, The YES Campaign
 * Science and Policy Advisory Council, Global Footprint Network
 * Winner of the 1987 World Food Prize
 * Winner of the 2000 Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute: Four Freedoms Award
 * Former Governing Board Member, Auroville Foundation
 * Emeritus Chair, Hunger Project
 * Honorary Board, Green Cross International
 * Editorial Board, People and Planet
 * Advisory Council, LEAD International

==Other Affiliations ==
 * Founder Member and later Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the International Council for Research on Agro-forestry (1977-1982)
 * Founder-Chairman, Society for the Promotion of Wasteland Development, India (1982-86)
 * Chairman, Advisory Panel on Environment, Forestry and Food Security of the World Commission on Environment and Development (1984-1986)
 * Trustee, World Resources Institute (1985-1994)
 * Chairman, Editorial Advisory Panel for the World Resources Report (1986-1998)
 * Trustee, Better World Society (1986-1992)
 * Honorary Vice-President, World Wild Life Fund International (1985-1987)
 * President, International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (1984-1990)
 * President, International Society for Mangrove Ecosystems (1990-1993)
 * President, World Wide Fund for Nature-India (1989-1996)
 * Chairman, Board of Trustees, Centre for Science and Environment, New Delhi (2003 onwards)
 * Winner of the 1999 Volvo Environment Prize
 * Honorary Trustee, Woods Hole Research Center